Laptops Arena

Just how big is Alienware’s 19-inch, SLI-based top-of-the-line mALX gaming laptop? Packed into the box is a backpack seemingly large enough for an Everest climb. With dual Nvidia Go 7900 GTX cards and dual HDD support up to 240GB, the Alienware Aurora mALX may be the ultimate rig for flying through the latest games at the highest settings.

At 15 pounds and a base price of $4,499 (our configuration costs $5,549), this system is best suited for LAN parties. Wherever you take the Alienware Aurora mALX, it will dominate the competition.

The mALX’s 3DMark scores promised good things to come (27,116 on 03 and 5,624 on 06), and it generated stellar frame rates in F.E.A.R.: 85 fps on auto-detect and 81 fps with settings maxed. Even with 4X full-screen antialiasing and all lighting and shadow options enabled, that performance was absolutely smooth. The view was so nice we wanted to play the game all over again.

The excellent gaming performance doesn’t quite mean perfect productivity. While the Alienware Aurora mALX is capable of handling any aspect of media and document creation, the AMD processor benchmarks slightly lower than Intel’s Core Duo chips. This huge system requires a lot of power; the battery drained in just over an hour. Wi-Fi strength isn’t great, either, with a mere 8.1 Mbps at 15 feet and 5.9 Mbps at 50 feet.

We were disappointed that despite the ample space, dedicated media controls don’t make an appearance. That’s a notable omission, even though they’re not part of Alienware’s typical design. As a consolation, a Windows Media Center remote is available.

Via laptopmag.